BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, pumped 230 billion yuan (about 36 billion U.S. dollars) into the financial system through open market operations Friday.

The operations will help offset factors such as payment of taxes and central treasury cash management, and keep liquidity in the banking system at a reasonable and stable level, the People's Bank of China said on its website.

The operations consisted of 110 billion yuan of 7-day reverse repos, 80 billion yuan of 28-day reverse repos and 40 billion yuan of 63-day reverse repos.

The interest rates for 7-day, 28-day and 63-day operations were unchanged at 2.5 percent, 2.8 percent and 2.95 percent, respectively.

No reverse repos matured Friday.

The central bank has increasingly relied on open market operations for liquidity management, rather than cuts in interest rates or reserve requirement ratios.

The country will continue its prudent and neutral monetary policy, maintain reasonable and stable liquidity, and control the floodgates of money supply to facilitate supply-side structural reform, the central bank said last week in a monetary policy report for the fourth quarter of 2017.